Nearly half of heart attacks could be ‘silent’

An article published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation reveals that nearly half of all heart attacks were silent in nature, i.e. have no significant symptoms.

The person burnt the heart attack may have no warning signs – such as chest pain, shortness of breath and cold sweats, but blood flow is still restricted to the heart, causing an increase in the risk of death and other long-term problems like heart disease.

The symptoms of these silent attacks are usually gets unnoticed, and only detected later during an ECG to check patients heart’s electrical activity.

Silent heart attacks accounted for 45 per cent of all heart attacks and increased the risk of dying from heart disease by three times, and it was found that silent heart attacks were more likely to cause death in women.

An expert said that the outcomes from silent heart attacks are as bad as from those that display clinical symptoms and they should be treated as aggressively as ones that present symptoms.